were adorned with silver covers. One epistle-book was adorned with silver covers; but, one being insufficient, he had a second made, one of whose covers was of silver, the other of gold. Two 'sacramentaria altaris' were covered with silver.

Now, unlike the gospel-books and epistle-books, these two 'sacramentaria altaris' were not duplicates the one of the other. They are described as sacramentaria altaris unum et alterum,' not as 'sacramentaria duo.' They were correlative and complementary the one to the other, as were the two covers of an epistle-book ('tabulae aurea una altera uero argentea'). The complete inventory, therefore, was as follows:

An old and a new epistle-book; one for the celebrant, the other for the subdeacon.

Two gospel-books, neither of them new; one for the celebrant, the other for the deacon.

Two distinct and correlative 'sacramentaria altaris': both for the priest (sacramentaria altaris unum et alterum), neither of them new.

Had Desiderius been so minded, he might, one would suppose, have appropriated the plenary missal to the celebrant while providing the sacred ministers, one with an epistle-book, the other with a gospelbook. But such an arrangement would not have satisfied his ideal of the dignity proper to the altar of such an abbey as that of Monte Cassino. He therefore replaced it by its constituent elements, each in a separate volume-an epistle-book, a gospel-book, a 'liber sacramentorum' (sacramentarium unum) and a canon (sacramentarium alterum). It is this last which, as I said just now, is to the present day used-in a developed form-by bishops and prelates celebrating according to the Roman rite.

It may be that the chartula missalis on which Alcuin wrote, or caused to be written, a set of votive masses for the use of the monks of Fulda' was an open sheet of vellum meant in the first instance to carry the canon of the mass. But, even if it should be proved that 'chartula missalis' was not a technical term with a fixed and wellknown meaning, but one invented for the occasion by Alcuin, there is a passage in his letter to Eanbald, Archbishop of York, which seems to prove that the custom of making the canon a separate document from the book containing the variable portions of the mass was a custom with which he was familiar, and which he regarded as peculiarly

1 Alcuin, Ep. 142 (Migne, c. 385).

Roman:-' De ordinatione et dispositione missalis libelli nescio cur demandasti. Numquid non habes Romano more ordinatos libellos sacratorios abundanter? Habes quoque et ueteris consuetudinis sufficienter sacramentaria maiora. Quid opus est noua condere dum uetera sufficiunt1?' The obvious meaning of this seems to be that the 'sacramentarium maius' and the 'libellus sacratorius'—or, as a Cassinese monk in the eleventh century would have said, the 'sacramentaria unum et alterum'-when used the one as complement to the other, supplied between them the prayers contained in the 'libellus missalis.'

When, then, we find Egbert, Archbishop Eanbald's immediate predecessor, writing about a 'liber missalis,' and writing about it with a necessarily implied regard to the 'mos Romanus,' we may assume that he fully appreciated the signification of the term, and that he, if any one, would know what in Roman usage the term was intended to signify. But there are three interesting features about Archbishop Egbert's employment of the phrase. One is, that it is the earliest ascertained instance of its employment; another is, that the specific 'liber missalis' of which Archbishop Egbert wrote was the very book which Gregory the Great sent to England by Augustine; and, carried thus by a single flight of thought from York in the eighth century to Rome in the sixth, I should be dull indeed did I not perceive, in the third place, that Egbert speaks of this mass-book of Gregory's as 'suus missalis liber,' as also of 'missalia sua.'

I think, then, that, true though it be that Gregory gave the title of 'Liber Sacramentorum' to the first edition of his liturgical compilation, the edition which he sent to England was entitled, and entitled by himself, 'Liber Missalis'; that he called it 'Liber Missalis' because he had introduced into it, certainly the canon, probably an 'ordo missae'; and that a reason for thus associating in a single volume the canon and his compilation of 'sacramenta,' or liturgical prayers, was that the compilation was now sufficiently revised to justify him in doing so.

But, it may be asked, If this be so; what accident, caprice, necessity, can have urged the scribe of the Corpus MS. to write an alien text of the canon? If the monks of St Augustine's had St Gregory's text in their libri missales, why did he not use it? I shall attempt an answer to these questions in a later chapter.

1 Haddan and Stubbs, 'Councils,' &c. III. 508.

2 See above, p. ix.

THE ERASED PREFACES.

No fewer than fifty-five Prefaces have been erased from the Proprium de Tempore. Only fifteen remain. Of these fifteen, three had been marked with a marginal obelus, and owe their escape to the fact, as it would appear, that, the masses to which they belong being adventitious, the Gregorian Antiphonary offered no officia to take their place. Of the twelve which thus seem to survive by right of survival, three are duplicates. The survivors by right of survival, thus nine in number, are :—

I. 'Cuius hodie faciem,' &c. (fol. 10 v.), 2. ‘Quia per incarnati,' &c. (foll. 11, 12 v.), 3. 'Quia nostri saluatoris,' &c. (fol. 12), 4. 'Quia cum unigenitus,' &c. (fol. 17), 5. 'Qui corporali ieiunio,' &c. (fol. 20), 6. 'Quem in hac nocte,' &c. (fol. 35 v.), 7. 'Et te quidem,' &c. (foll. 41, 46), 8. 'Qui post resurrectionem,' &c. (fol. 51 v.), 9. 'Qui ascendens,' &c. (foll. 53 v., 54).

In the Proprium Sanctorum all but thirteen have been erased, and as many as ten of these are condemned by the marginal obelus. The unmarked survivors are the Preface for the Nativity ('Quia per incarnati,' &c.) at fol. 78 v., the Preface, at fol. 111 v., in honour of the Blessed Virgin, recently imposed on the Western Church by Urban II. at the time when the Corpus MS. was executed, and one, at fol. 137 v., beginning with the words 'Qui aecclesiam tuam.'

After the Proprium Sanctorum we have, at fol. 138, the mass ‘In dedicatione aecclesiae.' Its Preface remains, and remains uncondemned, as though it possessed a claim to survival which had been respected by the monks of St Augustine's.

Then come eleven Missae de Communi (fol. 138 v.-143 v.). The six Prefaces found in these have, all of them, been condemned; and opposite the first of them, at fol. 139 v., is a memorandum directing the substitution of the 'Qui aecclesiam tuam' which had been spared at fol. 137 v.

After this we have a promiscuous group of votive masses. Some of them have an Epistle and Gospel, four of them have a Preface. The four Prefaces are uncondemned, not, as it would seem, because the owners of the book recognised in them a claim to survival, but, simply, because this group of masses was not reviewed with an eye to the Prefaces. When the reviser found himself at the end of the Gregorian exemplar, he closed the book and laid down the style.

Of the three unmarked and unerased Prefaces in the Proprium Sanctorum, the first has already been recorded. There remain there

fore to be added to the list of survivors by claim to survival,-10. 'Et te in ueneratione,' &c. (fol. 111v.), 11. 'Qui aecclesiam tuam,' &c. (fol. 137 v.), and 12. the 'Quia cum ubique sis,' &c. appointed (at fol. 138) to be used on the anniversary of the consecration of a church.

Six of the twelve are in the well-known list drawn up by Pope Pelagius II., and another was instituted by Pope Urban II. If it could be proved that the mass 'In dedicatione aecclesiae' is adventitious, we might plausibly explain the escape of the Preface to the accident of its not meeting the eye of the corrector as he passed from the Proprium to the Commune in the exemplar; but if the mass be primary it would, I think, be safer to conclude that the Preface is authentic.

Making allowance, then, for this doubtful exception, we find that four remain as claimants on our regard; namely, those numbered 1, 3, 6 and II in the foregoing lists.

The last of them is mentioned by Honorius of Autun in the following passage of the 'Gemma Animae':-' Pelagius papa nouem praefationes cantari statuit, scilicet 'Quia per incarnati' de natiuitate, 'Quia cum unigenitus' de epiphania, 'Qui corporali ieiunio' de quadragesima, 'Qui salutem humani generis' de passione Domini uel de sancta cruce, 'Te quidem Domine omni tempore' de pascha, 'Qui post resurrectionem' de ascensione, 'Qui ascendens super omnes coelos' de pentecoste, 'Qui cum unigenito filio,' de Trinitate, 'Te Domine suppliciter exorare' de Petro et Paulo, quae etiam de pluribus apostolis dicitur. Gregorius uero papa decimam 'Qui ecclesiam tuam' de sancto Andrea adiecit quae de uno quolibet apostolo usquequaque dici consueuit. Noviter autem Urbanus secundus papa undecimam de sancta Maria addidisse non ignoratur, quae a pluribus ubique frequentatur1.' It cannot, surely, be an accidental coincidence that the ' Qui aecclesiam tuam,' first found under a slightly different, and evidently earlier, form in the Verona MS., and found there in honour of St Andrew, should be the very Preface, and the only Preface, which the monks of St Augustine's took care to cause to be introduced into their mass for one Apostle; and the procedure is all the more remarkable because they cancelled another Preface to make way for it. It would seem as if a custom which in other places had died out for lack of written authentication from Rome had survived among the sons of St Augustine at Canterbury in virtue of the authority of St Gregory himself as declared in the pages of that later redaction of the Sacramentary which he had placed in the hands of the founder of their society.

1 Honorius Augustodunensis, 'Gemma Animae,' I. cxx. (Migne, CLXXII. 583 B).

As to the 'Cuius hodie faciem' (fol. 10 v.) and the 'Quia nostri saluatoris' (fol. 12), we have already seen that they are two members of an interesting group of constituent changes effected in the Sacramentary after the Sacramentary had been finally committed to parchment. The analogy to that group of changes exhibited by several others, and the marvellous agreement of them all in bearing the severest stichometrical test which could be applied to them, leave it past all doubt that the 'Cuius hodie faciem' and the 'Quia nostri saluatoris' owe it to no accident that they have been allowed to survive in the Corpus MS, but to the fact that they were part and parcel of the document brought to Canterbury.

The only Preface in the Proprium de Tempore-'Quem in hac nocte' (fol. 35 v.)-which it remains for me to notice has, it is true, no such attestation. But I cannot believe that men who kept the book in constant use would have allowed one, and only one, unauthorized Preface to remain uncancelled, and that a Preface of such extraordinary length as the 'Quem in hac nocte.'

The erasure of the 'Et te domine suppliciter exorare' at fol. 98 v. must, I think, be referred to inadvertence; for I see no trace of a cross in the margin, although the erasure of the text itself was so slightly executed as to leave almost the whole of it quite legible; and the constituent has been reproduced verbatim et litteratim on fol. 41 V.

THE PLENA HEBDOMADA POST PENTECOSTEN.'

When dealing with the antiphonarial excerpts we found reason for the opinion that the indications which in very many of our masses stand between the capitulum and the first rubric were taken from the earliest ascertained edition of the Antiphonary.

But we also saw that the second and third editions exhibit readings of the text of the Psalter different from those of the first; and that the third exhibits readings different from those common to the first and second.

And I find a like phenomenon in a fasciculus appended to our Missal, a little document as to the authenticity of whose several details there cannot be a doubt1. Comprising in its subject-matter threeunhappily, only three-masses of Gregorian compilation, it gives us as

1 See Appendix A to the present Missal.